The Frog - La Maison du Duke

BULLETIN NR 2, APRIL 2016, ÅRGÅNG 24
”The Frog”
In this issue
we present a
portrait of Ben
Webster written
in a personal
way by
Steve Wallace.
2-2016
Vårnyheter!
I vårt förra nummer av Bulleti­
nen hade vi glädjande nog två nya
medlemmar att hälsa välkomna och
i detta nummer kan vi meddela att
vi åter har fått två nya medlemmar.
Men tyvärr minskar medlemskad­
ern undan för undan och det är
mycket tråkigt att konstatera.
Fjärde måndagen i februari hade
vi årsmöte. I år avgick Key Jiger­
ström som ledamot av styrelsen.
Han har varit medlem sedan DESS
startade sin verksamhet 1994. Som
ledamot av styrelsen invaldes han
2004. Key var bland annat den som
engagerade orkestrar under åren då
vi höll till på f.d. Gyllene Cirkeln
och som mötte stor uppskattning.
Medlemsantalet ökade under de
åren, men verksamheten kunde
inte fortsätta på grund av för stora
kostnader. Under senare år har han
varit ansvarig för vår websida. Ett
stort tack Key för Din insats för
DESS under en lång följd av år.
Till ersättare för Key valdes en
gammal bekant, nämligen Göran
Wallén. Han behöver väl ingen
presentation. Göran var vår ord­
förande de första 10 åren och det
var tack vare honom som vi kunde
arrangera de mycket lyckade och
välarrangerade Duke Elling­
tonkonferenserna 1994 och 2004.
Nu är han med igen och med sin
erfarenhet och sitt vittförgrenade
kontaktnät kommer han att vara
till stor nytta för DESS.
Jag vill även tacka Björn Englund
för hans insatser i bulletinredak­
tionen som han nu valt att lämna.
Han har under sin tid i redaktionen
2
bidragit med insiktsfulla artiklar av
diskografisk natur. Vi hoppas och tror
att vi framdeles kan konsultera Björn
när diskografiska problem uppstår.
I förra numret rapporterade jag
om de tankar som finns på att ge
klubben närvaro på Facebook i syfte
att ge klubben ett ansikte där och
stimulera kontakten och utbyten
mellan medlemmarna och mellan
medlemmar och andra Ellingtonintresserade. Det arbetet har gått
vidare och olika lösningar för en
Facebook-grupp har studerats. De
testas för närvarande och om allt
fungerar väl bör det finnas en DESSgrupp på Facebook inom kort.
Styrelsen har också gett klarteck­
en för att klubben skall arbeta fram
en ny hemsida. Key Jigerström, som
i många år gjort ett uppoffrande ar­
bete för att hålla hemsidan igång,
har avsagt sig den uppgiften. Men
när vi nu tackar Key för vad han
gjort är det naturligt att vi också
funderar över innehållet, utseendet
och funktionen med en hemsida.
Ett förslag till hemsida eller snara­
re webbplats håller nu på att testas.
Allt som nu finns på DESS hemsida
skall finnas på den nya webbplats­
en. Men tanken är också att ge
den en starkare inriktning mot ny­
hetsinformation med möjlighet för
medlemmar som är intresserade att
lägga in eget material. Webbplats­
en kommer också att ha medlemsrum med ett Ellington-arkiv av
musik, video, foto och artiklar där
DESS medlemmar kan botanisera
fritt och ladda ner till den egna
datorn eller smartphonen. När
utprovningen är avklarad och alla
beslut har fattats läggs webbplats­
en upp och ellington.se får ett nytt
utseende. Det kan komma att ske
före nästa medlemsmöte. Ulf Lun­
din har varit föreningen synner­
ligen behjälplig i utformandet av
den nya webbplatsen och kommer
framdeles att ha en central roll i
hanteringen av densamma.
Som vi nämnde i förra bulletinen
kommer vi i år åter att ge ut en ny
CD till Er. Den kommer att in­
nehålla inspelningar från ett spe­
ciellt välkänt place..., som jag inte
vill avslöja nu. Det förblir en hem­
lighet tills Ni får CDn fram emot
jul. Men vi tror att den kommer att
bli uppskattad, inte minst tack vare
det utmärkta ljudet som uppnåtts
på denna skiva. Gå därför inte
miste om denna gåva, för Du har
väl inte glömt att betala in årets
medlemsavgift, 250:-, på vårt
bankgirokonto 211-3207 som
ersätter vårt tidigare plusgirokonto. Har Du inte betalat in
din medlemsavgift den 1 juni,
stryks Du ur medlemslistan
och det blir ingen CD. Det vore
väl synd!
Leif Jönsson,
ordförande i DESS
Duke´s
Place
Snålblåst på årsmötet
och trist efterbörd
i kvällens konsert
Det blåste kallt på årsmötet den 22 februari när en gammal surdeg vädrades vid
val av en nygammal styrelsemedlem. Ett
ovanligt drama för DESS, som dock löstes efter viss parlamentarisk förvirring.
Mer om årsmötet på annan plats, för sedan började medlemsmötet med numera
rätt obligatoriska rekvisita.
Först några bidrag ur Anders Asplunds outtömliga kollektion av Ellington
på film, där jag med särskild förtjusning
noterade Rolf Ericson på bild i Rockin’
In Rhythm från en Englandsturné 1964.
Trevligt stoff, men nog vore det värt en
grundligare kommentar för att ge publiken en merupplevelse.
Sedan var det musik av en kvartett
med trumpetaren Jan Stolpe som ledande
namn. Det föreföll som klubbkamraterna
omkring mig gillade framträdandet, vilket också har bestyrkts av de mejl som
nått mig. De flesta av dessa mejl tycks
främst vara ämnade att stärka styrelsens
självuppfattning av gjorda insatser men
innehåller också värderande omdömen
om musik och musiker. Det händer inte
sällan att mina egna åsikter går stick i stäv
med vad som framförs av dessa recensenter. Det står dem helt fritt att delge mig
sina tankar men jag måste få sagt att det
också besvärar mig så länge jag har uppdraget att formulera mig i Bulletinen.
Som nu! Jag kan nämligen inte se mycket försonande i kvällens konsert. Orkesterledaren var uppenbart ur form. Det
CLAES ENGLUND
På tisdagsmorgonen den 29 mars får vi beskedet att vår
nära och mycket käre vän Claes Englund gått ur tiden. Vän
och klasskamrat sedan tidigt 50-tal, student- och DESSkompis och med ett helt liv tillsammans. Claes drabbades
lördagen den 19 mars av en hjärtinfarkt som visade sig
vara lätt, men han fick tillbringa söndagen, som var hans
77:e födelsedag, på sjukhuset. Allt hade gått bra och i två samtal med
honom den gångna veckan var han fylld av tillförsikt, och vi skissade på
lämpliga dagar för att ses och skriva inbjudan till studentklassen för det
årliga mötet den 20 maj (”Vi” är 3/4-delar av organisationskommittén).
Men så på långfredagen drabbades han av en tydligen rejäl stroke som han
inte överlevde. Nedanstående skrivet i någon slags sorgens bedövning.
Claes var född den 20 mars 1939 i Uppsala, där han gick i folkskolan
och därefter i Högre allmänna läroverket, det som numer kallas Katedral­
skolan, där hans far var lektor i kemi. 1957 tog han studenten tillsam­
mans med oss och gjorde sedan sin militärtjänst i Kustartilleriet. Han
gick vidare till Uppsala universitet för att studera filosofi med estetik som
huvudämne, för Teddy Brunius.
Claes var mycket teaterintresserad. Efter avslutade studier började
han arbeta på Riksteatern och blev redaktör för deras tidskrift Entré (eller
entré som man stavade den). 1969 blev han en kort tid chef för Västerås
Länsteater, knuten till Riksteatern. Därefter återgick han till redaktörs­
jobbet och kom att följa svensk och internationell teater i hundratals ar­
tiklar och intervjuer. Efter sin pensionering fick han uppdraget att skriva
Riksteaterns historia. Därefter blev uppdrag för teatern allt färre, något
som han sörjde, eftersom han hade både lust och stor förmåga att skriva.
Den lusten fick han utlopp för, efter att vi som nya medlemmar efter El­
lingtonkonferensen 1994 tagit med honom i DESS. Om någon skulle vara
medlem så var det ju Claes. Han var ett levande uppslagsverk vad gällde
klassisk jazz, beläst på jazzlitteratur och våra diskussioner inte minst
Foto: Sonja Svensson
betyder mycket för en kvartett och kan
inte helt kompenseras av att den rutinerade och välformulerade Calle Lundborg
tog allt sitt tillvara när chanserna gavs.
I den stillsamt reserverade stil som är
hans. Udda och fängslande var basisten
Magnus Marcks, som originellt nog prövade sig på In A Sentimental Mood med
stråkens hjälp och vann publiken och
mig med ett av kvällens bästa nummer.
Nog sagt för denna gång ….
Bo Holmqvist
IN MEMORIAM
vad gäller preferenser började i skolan och har fortsatt allt­
sedan dess (sic). Med Bulletinen började han arbeta 2010
vilket medförde en kvalitetshöjning, som också bidragit till
tidningens numer goda rykte, även utomlands. Han kunde
bedöma kvaliteten på föreslaget material och visste hur både
det svenska och det engelska språket skulle behandlas på
bästa sätt. Hans språkgranskning var fenomenal. Han hade mängder av
idéer och förslag till texter, och idéer från andra i redaktionen mottog han
alltid med stor entusiasm.
Claes kunde sin Duke. Detta kom alltid till uttryck i de artiklar som ingick
i en lång serie som han kallade ”Other Duke’s Places”. När det gällde själva
musiken var det speciellt trummisarnas insatser han ville bedöma. Han
visste hur en trummis skulle bära upp ett storband och han höll en gång
ett mycket uppskattat anförande i ämnet på ett av DESS medlemsmöten.
Det blev senare även en artikel i ett nummer av Bulletinen. I detta num­
mer av tidningen ingår en artikel där Claes behandlar några av Ellington’s
trummisar.
Claes hade också ett intresse för bildkonst och en betydande begåvning för
teckning och måleri. Men efter skoltiden vägrade han att utveckla denna,
med hänvisning till att hans yngre bror var en professionell och utmärkt
bildkonstnär.
Det är omöjligt att på några rader sammanfatta ett helt livs intressanta
erfarenheter, diskussioner, upptäckter, skratt och bekymmer, men vi bär ho­
nom med oss resten av våra liv.
Våra tankar går till hans hustru Susanne, och barnen Johan, Hedda,
Petter och Leo.
Norrtälje och Uppsala den 29 mars 2016
vännerna Leif Klitze och P.O. Sporrong
3
Ben Webster
The Heart of the Matter
By Steve Wallace
Ben Webster fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins’
ground-breaking tenor saxophone style early in his career, but
eventually discovered himself and largely formed his own style
by about 1938. Shortly after this he found a setting as perfect for
him as the Count Basie band was for Lester Young – the Duke
Ellington Orchestra, from 1940-43.
His time with Ellington and especially
the exposure to Johnny Hodges further
shaped him. Hawkins may have been
Webster’s original model, but Hodges
and another great alto saxophonist –
Ben’s lifelong friend Benny Carter – were
his biggest influences. From Carter he
learned breath control and to smooth out
his phrasing with more legato, from Hodges he learned how to project emotion by
using glissandi and imbuing his sound
with an endlessly nuanced vibrato.
and Wayne Shorter. By the early ‘60s, his
playing seemed badly out of fashion and,
finding work scarce and perhaps feeling
marginalized in America, he exiled himself to Europe, in search of a fresh start
and a new audience for his saxophone
musings, never to return home.
Even the Ellington band couldn’t contain his Promethian temper for long
and he left in a huff after an altercation
with Duke in 1943. His style evolved
somewhat after this in small ways as he
and his life changed, but he never really
embraced bebop or other aspects of modernism in jazz, his playing remained essentially the same and true to itself.
In perspective
This individuality was celebrated in the
1950s, when Webster found an ideal outlet in the touring Jazz at the Philarmonic
troupes and the attendant record labels
(Clef, Norgran, Verve) founded by Norman Granz. His many recordings from
that time capture him in a kind of golden
middle period and moved critics and listeners alike to belatedly place Webster
alongside Hawkins and Young in a triumvirate of classic jazz tenors. By 1960
though, the Granz/Verve forum dried up
for Webster and he suddenly faced being
a lonely, anachronistic footnote. He was
seriously out of step with the young men
who were increasingly setting the pace
on his horn in those years: Sonny Rollins
and John Coltrane, later Joe Henderson
4
But the passing of decades allows the
dust of events and trends to settle, can
bring the perspective of distance so that
we can see things – history, ourselves, art
– more clearly. Listening to Webster now,
he is perhaps the most timeless of jazz
players, he never sounds remotely dated
and sweeps aside considerations of style,
period, “schools” and genres as the tri-
fles they mostly are. Ben Webster is forever, his playing defies age by being truly
beautiful and wholly original. Beauty is
never irrelevant and originality cannot
die. He achieved this singular, poetic
beauty by wedding the twin pillars of his
colossal playing: his incomparable, magnificent tone and his very direct communication of real emotion.
Style
It’s hard to find words to describe his
sound, yet they could fill volumes. The
gruff-to-tender tone he produced from
his saxophone Betsy was with him all of
his life, it was his domain and his palette
– majestic, sumptuous, roomy, sensuous,
a slab of mahogany wrapped in velvet.
At medium tempos, it billowed, furled
and swayed like a huge sail in the wind.
On ballads it purred, whispered and
caressed, sometimes fading to a mere
breathy exhalation. On up-tempo songs
or slow blues numbers it was the roar
and snarl of a provoked lion, his tenor
sounding like metal on metal, a Cadillac
engine badly in need of an oil change.
In a single solo, Webster could start out
sounding as light and fluffy as a soufflé,
move to a medium volume with a vibrato that neighed like a horse, offer some
savage parrot squawks or dragon roars,
then slither like a boa constrictor back to
the floating meringue again. If, as Zoot
Sims once put it, Stan Getz was “a nice
bunch of guys”, then Ben Webster as an
entire menagerie, his saxophone a vessel
of sound along the lines of Noah’s Ark.
Webster’s command of his sound – and
his vibrato and dynamics – was absolute
and shaped his playing. The sheer luxurious mass of it allowed him to play very
simply and slowly; with a sound like
this he couldn’t play very fast, nor did
he need to. His focus on tone colour allowed him to work in broad strokes and
handle big matters. His solos were oratorical, a series of dramatic pronouncements, melodic statements and shapes
rather than lines, with large swatches of
space and silence left between these. He
didn’t generate time so much as he filled
it, straddling the rhythm section underneath him, floating on top of their beat
like the absurdly tiny hats he wore perched atop his massive head. For this reason, Ben always sounded his best with
good pianists and rhythm sections, he
needed them to generate momentum and
make his pauses sound better. He played
the piano (his first instrument) quite well
Duke, Ben and
Jimmy Hamilton
seem to discuss
some tricky pas­
sage for the reeds.
and idolized great pianists like Teddy
Wilson, Art Tatum, Jimmy Rowles (a lifelong friend), Oscar Peterson, Jimmy
Jones, Hank Jones and Joe Zawinul.
In certain registers during his more
lyrical moods, he could sound uncannily
like a string instrument. He tended to
play lower on the tenor in the 1940s and
sometimes sounded like a cello, albeit
one on steroids. In the ‘50s he played higher on the horn and especially on ballads
could sound for all the world like a viola.
It was not only the warm woodiness of
the timbre but the vibrato and phrasing,
the sustain that resembled bowing. This
may have resulted from studying the violin as a child, but whatever the reason,
it was a unique feature of his playing.
Comparisons
His rich menu of sound constantly served
the conveyance of feeling, which is what
his playing is all about. He felt things
very deeply – tenderness, rage, nostalgia,
joy, yearning, loneliness, absent friends,
homesickness – and these feelings were
never far from the surface of his music.
Though he had perfect pitch, he often
played with deliberately blurred or wide
intonation – his notes were in tune at the
centre, but were often surrounded by an
English of moving air, some fur or fuzziness. I pity anyone trying to transcribe
one of his solos, because he rarely played
a ‘straight’ note, his were often bent or
suffused with a whole range of inflection.
They were more like sounds than notes
– and in these sounds lie his emotional
transparency, his openness. His playing
acquired the properties of language, of
human speech. Other saxophonists offered virtuosity and musical thought, fast,
complex lines full of harmonic and rhythmic brinksmanship. They played ideas,
whereas Ben seemed to play the shapes of
feelings, tone-syllables which talk directly
to us. And more than any other saxophonist, with the possible exception of Lester
Young, Ben Webster seems to offer us his
heart itself, as if to say, “Here it is on a silver platter, take it.”
Such emotional directness cannot become dated, because feelings are essentially
what humans have experienced each and
every day, forever. Who among us has
not known the longing for lost friends,
the joy of Christmas morning as a child,
the thrill of first love, the heartbreak of
romantic rejection, the self-doubt of failure, the ache of loneliness, the despair of
aging? How can these be irrelevant? Not
while Ben Webster speaks to all of these
feeling and more, he doesn’t wallow in
them; his playing offers sentiment, but is
never sentimental. He stops short of the
cloying or mawkish by being utterly sincere and devoid of self-pity, by achieving
a kind of beautiful and passionate honesty. It also helped that at any moment
he was fully capable of producing a note
that could blow you halfway across the
room; his playing captures your attention and keeps you on your toes.
Ben Interlude #1
Ben Webster had the habit of sometimes
tailing a note off to just a tiny puff or
breath, finishing it with a miraculous
sotto voce vibrato. It sounded like this –
phuff-ffff-ff-fff-ff-ff-ff….f.. He was living
in Los Angeles in the late ‘50s and work
was scarce, but when he did work it was
often with a marvellous band – Jimmy
Rowles on piano, Jim Hall on guitar,
Red Mitchell or Leroy Vinnegar on bass
and Frank Butler on drums. They played
at a club called The Rennaissance and
one night Butler called the young Billy
Higgins to sub for him on drums. Higgins, only about eighteen, was both excited and nervous about this chance to
5
work with such a master and wanted to
play as considerately as possible for the
elder Ben – he decided he would use brushes almost exclusively. The first number
as at a slow-medium tempo and Billy
was stirring away with his brushes on
the snare drum when, halfway through
his first chorus, Ben turned around and
gruffly barked “Sticks, kid!” out of the
side of his mouth. Billy, a little startled,
switched to sticks and the ride cymbal.
The same thing happened whenever
Ben played on the next couple of numbers, which were a little faster. Finally,
Ben called a ballad and Billy figured he’d
have to let him play brushes on this one.
But no, eight bars into the melody, Ben
leaned aside and snarled out “Sticks!”
again, Billy couldn’t believe it. When the
set was over, he was confused and a little
hurt, he thought he’d played quite well.
He decided to ask Ben about it and approached him. “Gee, Mr. Webster, don’t
you like the way I play brushes?”. Ben
answered, “Huh? Naah, it ain’t that, kid.
You play just fine. But the shwoo, shwoo, shwoo from you brushes is getting’
in the way of the foo, foo, ff-foo coming’
out my horn.”
First impression
I’ll never forget becoming fully aware of
Ben’s greatness for the first time. It happened in a car sometimes in 1977, though
I knew of him before that and had probably heard him a little in passing. Pianist
George McFetridge and I worked regularly near the Toronto Airport that year
and one night we were riding home in
6
George’s car and he popped in a cassette
tape, saying, “This is a long Ben Webster
track, it might last all the way home.” (I
had no idea at the time what record this
was from, but I’ve since come to know it
– Ben Webster and Associates, an all-star
affair from 1959.) A good-sized band began playing Ellington’s In A Mellotone at
a perfectly relaxed medium tempo, with
at least two tenors and a trumpet playing the melody and Webster answering
them with improvised countermelodies.
This was followed by a long series of solos, most of them lasting two choruses.
Unusually, the bass led off – Ray Brown
– brilliant, but a little hard to hear over
the car engine. Next was piano and I
distinctly remember George saying it
was Hank Jones, but it’s actually Jimmy
Jones, followed by a slightly diffident
guitar chorus by Les Spann. Then came
two choruses from a tenor player I didn’t
recognize, who used some double-time
and other impressive boppish touches.
(It’s Budd Johnson, who’s become one of
my favourites. He wasn’t supposed to be
on this date, but Ben stopped off at a bar
on the way to the studio for a drink and
saw Budd and immediately asked him to
join as a guest on the session. This was
entirely typical of Ben and appropriate
because they were very old and dear
friends. They met sometime in the late
‘20s in Amarillo, Texas, where Ben was
working as a silent-movie pianist in a local theatre. Ben was interested in learning
to play the saxophone and had bought
an old tenor and Budd gave him his first
lessons and pointers on the horn, so this
was payback.) Next I recognized the urgent, buzzing rasp of Roy Eldridge and
as he always does, Roy dialled the heat
up a couple of notches. I’d scarcely recovered from this when Coleman Hawkins
entered in all his thundering and magisterial glory; by now the groove and intensity had reached mythic proportions, but
still no Ben Webster. There was a drum
interlude from Jo Jones and at last, after
being a cordial host (after you, fellas) or
perhaps thinking he’d save the best for
last, Big Ben entered the fray.
Even then, I was aware of Ben’s combative bravado, and in this competitive
arena I expected him to take the gloves off
and come out swinging right off the bat,
but no, he began with disarming restraint,
which I at first mistook for tentativeness.
Even holding back like this, his tone was
riveting; it went “Vrroooouuuwwwllll”
and sounded like the voice of God. In
his first chorus he almost toyed with
the song’s chords and the beat, playing
some very interesting and dissonant harmonic ideas, with unusual and angular
shapes, building steam. He uttered some
pretty savage roars in his second chorus,
but contrasted these with some oblique,
sideways murmurings. When he was
finished, I was literally blown away by
his control and utter mastery, the audaciously original imagination at work here.
Whether he was trying to or not (and I
rather suspect he was), Ben had effecti-
Some
lesser known
Webster
recordings
vely used the building excitement of all
the wonderful playing preceding him as
preamble and cannon fodder, sweeping
some very powerful players aside as almost incidental, irrelevant. He didn’t do
so with the exertion of force and muscle
as I expected, but rather with guile and
insinuating subtlety; his playing seemed
to imply as much as it directly stated. I
was surprised by the avant-garde abstraction of his solo, it was almost like
cubist painting in its bold manipulation
of big shapes and contours and I thought
of Ben as being the Picasso of jazz. One
thing I knew for sure after this, I had to
hear some more of him, and soon.
Fortunately, it was easy to find his records as Verve, following in the footsteps
of other labels, began issuing “two-fers”
from their vaults around then. I found
and bought three of these by Webster
from the fifties. One paired his two LPs
with Oscar Peterson, another his two
meetings with Coleman Hawkins and
a third was called Ballads and mostly
featured Ben’s sumptuous playing with
strings. These were the records that made
me fall in love with his playing and I’ve
been smitten ever since. Eventually, I
backtracked and digested his classic
playing with Ellington’s band, though I
didn’t do that entirely until CD reissues
were in full swing by the early ‘90s.
A rediscovery
I was mostly moved to write this piece
on Ben by a strange and surprising discovery in my CD collection this past fall.
One day, to borrow Ellington’s phrase,
I had a “yen for Ben” and went over to
the Webster shelf looking for some of
his records to play. I spotted a three-CD
set on Definitive called Ben Webster: The
Complete Small Group Recordings, 1943-51,
which I’d forgotten all about. I vaguely
remember buying it and surely I must
have listened to it, but it felt like new information to me. So, into the CD player
went the three discs and there they stayed, I scarcely listened to anything else for
about two weeks. His playing throughout was a revelation, by turns dramatic, lyrical, ghostly, moving, raging and
above all, exciting.
This set is invaluable because in one
place, it offers the almost forgotten and
unknown Ben Webster, filling in the
blanks between his time with Ellington, which made his reputation, and his
Verve period, which crowned it. In many
ways, the mid ‘40s were his peak, but for
years his records from then were hard to
find, because they were mostly 78s and
not issued as albums. This set offers five
sessions led by Webster, one co-led with
Big Sid Catlett and six others with such
illustrious leaders as James P. Johnson,
Pete Johnson (his old Kansas City buddy
and piano teacher), Teddy Wilson, Benny
Morton, Cozy Cole and Benny Carter,
plus three led by very good but lesserknown musicians – Walter “Foots” Thomas, Al Hall and Bill De Arango. Webster
is surrounded by some of the finest players of that time, just the way he liked it.
Wonderful trumpeters such as Hot Lips
Page, Buck Clayton, Emmett Berry, Idrees Sulieman and believe it or not, Maynard Ferguson. And ace rhythm players
– aside from a good deal of his favourite
drummer Catlett, J.C. Heard, Cozy Cole
and Denzil Best are also here. State of the
art bassists such as Hall, Oscar Pettiford,
John Simmons, Israel Crosby. And most
importantly to Ben, great pianists – aside
from Wilson and both Johnsons, these
sessions feature such stalwarts as Marlowe Morris, Johnny Guarneri, the prophetic and shortlived Clyde Hart, Jimmy
Jones and the early bebop pianists, Al
Haig and Argonne Thornton (later Sadik
Hakim). As these names suggest, a lot of
this music is classic, mature small group
swing and some of the later sessions (especially from 1946) cross into early bebop territory. which didn’t seem to faze
Ben at all.
His playing here builds on his wonderful work with Ellington and, while
mining the same emotional territory as
he would alter, is quite different than his
work in the ‘50s. Whereas Ben’s sound
during the Verve years was often velvety
and at times ventured up quite high on
From ”the large gap of recor­
ding sessions” between 1947
and 1950 that Steve Wallace
mentions, still a few lesser
known recordings with Ben
Webster exists. Back in his ho­
metown Kansas City shortly
after his second period with El­
lington, November 1948 – July
1949 (expanding the Ellington
sax section to six men) Webster
on October 31 and November 1
1949 took part in blues recor­
ding sessions led by Bus Mo­
ten, three numbers, and singer
Walter Brown, four numbers.
They can be found on the 3-CD
album “Kansas City Blues” on
Capitol (CDP 7243 B 52042
2). Webster plays great, he feels
being “home” will full control
over his persuasive lyricism
and, in most numbers, with
his typical more brutal autho­
rity. Jay McShann plays first
class blues piano on the Walter
Brown sides.
Claes Englund
7
the tenor into almost a falsetto range,
his sound in the ‘40s was much heavier,
thicker and darker, his vibrato tighter
and he spent more time in the middle
to lower registers. Despite the deeper,
weightier sound, Ben was faster and
more mobile on the horn in the ‘40s and
tended to be more linear, playing longer,
serpentine lines phrased very smoothly
with a slurring legato. Ironically, though
his sound lightened in the ’50s, he generally played simpler and slower then. At
any rate, hearing this missing Ben Webster convinced me more than ever that
he is unique, one of the most eloquent,
profound and imperishable soloists jazz
has ever known.
Influences
Conventional jazz wisdom holds that
Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young
formed the two great early models of
tenor saxophone and that most players
followed one or the other, with Webster definitely being counted among the
Hawk followers. This was certainly true
early in Ben’s career. One story from the
early 1930s has it that Ben was not only
trying to sound just like Hawkins, but
to dress, act, walk and talk like him too.
One day a fried said, “Okay, I’m hearing and seeing Coleman Hawkins, but
where is Ben Webster?” By the late ‘30s
however, and continuing through his
time with Ellington, Webster developed
a style original and significant enough
that it formed a third stream of tenor
playing, between Hawkins and Young.
His first great follower was Don Byas. I
hear much more of Webster in Byas – in
his sound, phrasing and vibrato – than I
do Hawkins. Others followed; certainly
Lucky Thompson, Lockjaw Davis, Flip
Phillips, Benny Golson and especially
Paul Gonsalves were Webster men. And
Harold Ashby, who was a curator of
Ben’s style in much the same way that
Paul Quinichette was of Lester Young’s.
And later, so-called “avant-garde” players like Archie Shepp, David Murray and
Bennie Wallace are deeply indebted to
Webster and have acknowledged this. So
there is a strong line of influence coming
from Webster that is quite distinct from
Hawkins, it just took a while for people
to catch up to him and recognize it. I
think this is because Webster’s playing,
though very direct, is also quite abstract;
this is the paradox of his style. He deals
primarily with sound and emotion and
these are both abstract things.
8
Ben Interlude #2
On a Friday night in May of 1964, veteran jazz fan Don Brown and his wife
went to The Town Tavern to hear Ben
Webster. They were seated at the bar directly in front of the bandstand, which
was a raised affair up behind the bar at
about the level of the bartender’s shoulders. It was flanked by two of the biggest, noisiest cash registers in Toronto,
often described as “the stereophonic cash
registers”. There was a good Friday night
crowd on hand, but as usual, only a few
people were paying any attention to the
music. Ben was playing his heart out,
ably backed by the local trio of Norm
Amadio on piano, Bob Price on bass and
Archie Alleyne on drums, and Don could
sense his growing frustration. Ben had
had a few and was teetering dangerously
near the edge of the stage, and Don also
noticed that, unlike other elite musicians such as Duke Ellington or Coleman
Hawkins, Ben was not exactly a fashion
plate. He was wearing a baggy, rumpled
suit and, in contrast to the narrow, dark
ties in vogue then, Ben was sporting one
that had to have been eight or nine inches wide and could have served as some
country’s flag. Toward the end of his first
set, Ben noticed that Don and his wife
had been listening to him closely and he
leaned precariously over the edger of the
stand and asked if he could “play something pretty for the lady”. Don froze.
Here was one of his two favourite tenor
players (the other being Lester Young)
asking him to choose the final tune of
the set and his mind went blank for a
second and then he blurted out “Cottontail”. Of course Ben had played it
hundreds of times and he groaned, “Oh
God, not now”. Thinking fast, Don chose
something more appropriate, suggesting
“Willow Weep For Me”. Ben’s eyes lit up
and he gave an appreciative nod, saying
“You got it”. He launched into a glorious
interpretation of this beautiful old song
and suddenly one could hear a pin drop
in the club. Even the hookers and their
pimps down at the end of the bar stopped their chatter and were hanging on
his every note. It was one of those very
special moments, an example of the kind
of magic spell the thespian of the tenor
could weave.
The set over, Ben went as quickly as
his feet would carry him toward the
club’s entrance, where he’d spotted two
longtime friends just coming in. They
were Mrs. Anger, the widow of the late
Justice Anger of the Supreme Court of
Ontario, and her son Ron, who was at
the time the president of the Toronto
chapter of the Duke Ellington Society.
Mr. and Mrs. Anger had been longtime
Ellington fans and first heard Ben in
Hull, Quebec in 1940 when he appeared
there with Ellington shortly after joining the orchestra. Ben was dead set on
reaching the Angers and was really moving. Just then a young college student
jumped up, pulled a pen and pad from his
briefcase, and attempted to ask Ben for
his autograph, like a paper coffee cup in
the path of the charging Chicago Bears’
defensive line. The massive Webster
straight-armed the poor kid, knocking
him flat on his back onto a small table,
spilling its drinks and cigarette butts
all over the couple sitting there. Big Ben
never even broke stride and in a couple of
seconds had managed to throw his huge
arms around the petite Mrs. Anger. As
Don puts it, talk about extremes – in an
instant they’d seen Webster morph from
being the tender balladeer of “Willow”
to “The Brute” they’d read about, then
just as quickly back into “Gentle Ben”.
Both the man and his music were full of
contradictions.
Personality
Ben’s Jekyll-and-Hyde emotional volatility was the stuff of legend and turned up
both in his playing and in his behaviour.
He could be very gentle and sensitive, as
he was to his mother Mayme and greataunt Agnes Johnson, both of whom he
often lived with. They spoiled him with
their cooking and other attentions, but
he also doted on them. One story has
it that when the two ladies were older,
Ben used to brush their hair at night –
100 strokes each – before they retired to
bed. He could become maudlin and sentimental when remembering departed
friends – he was very close to both Jimmie Blanton and Sid Catlett, and their
early deaths left a hole in his heart. He
was known to weep openly when playing pretty ballads he loved, his eyes rolling back in his head, tears rolling down
his cheeks. These tears were never far
away. Many have told of Ben, remembering past times playing with great musicians, suddenly sobbing, saying, “Man,
why don’t I get to play with guys like
that anymore?”
But out on the prowl, with a snootful
of booze in him, look out … he turned
into “The Brute”, willing to take on all
corners. Pimps, sailors, rounders, anyone who offered a slight or insult – real
or imagined – Ben was all too willing to
whale the tar out of them and had the
physical prowess for this. If it didn’t
reach the point of mayhem, his hostility could still be obnoxious, belligerent, foul-mouthed, unmanageable. The
only person who could handle Webster
in this state was his old friend Benny
Carter. Webster would listen to reason
from Carter, whom he admired above
everyone else, saying, “There’s a man
who can bake a cake as light as a feather
and whip any man”. (Carter was famous
for his elegance, but was also a deadly
street-fighter).
Along with the temper and gargantuan
drinking, there was also ego and hauteur
in Ben, though a lot of it was bluster. I
think he felt the frustration of knowing that he was great, but undervalued.
He saw himself as regal, expected the
royal treatment and felt slighted when
it didn’t come. (There’s a famous, funny
story about this from Ben’s later days in
Europe. He was playing at a function attended by some European royalty and
broke all protocol by butting into the official receiving line holding his saxophone,
vigorously shaking some startled royal’s
hand, saying “Nice to meet ya Prince ….
Ben Webster, King of the Tenors!”) Milt
Hinton spoke of a time in the mid ‘50s
when Ben was living with him and his
wife Mona and not working much. Hinton was doing a lot of studio work then
and always tried to get Ben hired on record dates but to no avail, because Ben
insisted on being paid triple-scale for
doing sideman’s work. So Ben’s drink-
ing, ego and volatility made him his own
worst enemy. There is a large gap of recording sessions by Ben in small groups
between 1947 and 1950. Part of it was
the second A.F. of M. recording strike
of 1948 and that Webster rejoined Ellington’s band for a while from 1948-49.
But mostly between 1949 and 1950, his
drinking was really out of control and
he became ill, eventually moving back
to his hometown of Kansas City to be
nursed back to health by his mother and
great-aunt. When he recovered, he began
working with some obscure local bands
in K.C. and later L.A., where he moved
in 1951. Soon after that, Norman Granz
came to the rescue and Ben made a huge
comeback.
Certainly his temper was the reason
Ellington fired him. The story I’ve read
is that Ben had Ellington’s permission to
play piano with the band whenever Duke
was busy off the bandstand schmoozing
with management or customers, and
Ben loved to do this. One night while
drunk, he overstayed his welcome at the
keyboard, playing very badly and embarrassing everyone. When Duke gave
him hell and told him to get up, Ben was
so enraged he went to Duke’s dressing
room and cut a couple of the maestro’s
expensive suits to ribbons with a knife.
Duke gave him two week’s notice, making Webster one of the few musicians
Ellington ever actually fired. Webster
had to have felt shame and regret over
this, he loved Ellington and remained
devoted to his music for the rest of his
life. In some ways, his abrupt departure
from the Ellington fold was a tragedy –
it was a perfect setting for him and the
band provided him with a kind of musical home and family, something he later
lacked and craved. The brevity of his
stay does serve to concentrate the brilliance of his work with the band though.
Family
There is a growing conviction in some
scholarly jazz circles that Ben Webster
was in fact gay, closeted and possibly in
denial for his whole life. I’m not certain
how much of this is based on evidence
or testimony and how much is speculation. Outside of his mother and greataunt, Webster did not have many longstanding relationships with women. In
his profile on Webster, the great Whitney
Balliett mentions in passing that Webster
was married very briefly in the 1940s,
Said by Ben
In 1934, Fletcher Henderson sent
for me, and I went to New York.
Along with Ellington and Chick
Webb, Fletcher had just about the
top band and the hardest music
I’ve ever seen in my life! He had
arrangements that were written in
every key on the keyboard. I got a
lot of help from Russell Procope.
He would tell me to take my book
home and the next day he would
come around and help me with these
arrangements. If you were fortunate
enough to stay with Fletcher, I don’t
imagine you’d have too much trou­
ble in any other band afterwards.
But the height of my ambition
was to play with Duke. Barney
Bigard took a vacation in 1935 and
I had a chance to sit in the band for
two or three weeks. And we went
on the road for a little while. Then
we made this record Truckin’, and
we did In A Jam. Then Barney came
back, so I had to leave, naturally.
But I sure hated to leave, because
I’d enjoyed that music and hearing
these guys play. That was such a
great band. Duke has always been
”way out front”. He was then and
he still is.
Ben Webster and
Dexter Gordon
These two giants spent quite some
time together in Denmark. There is
actually two streets named after them
in Copenhagen ”Ben Webster Vej”
and ”Dexter Gordon Vej”. They also
appeared on gigs together and the fol­
lowing story produces a few laughs:
When Ben Webster and Dexter Gor­
don were playing together, Dexter was
taking a solo that seemed way too long
to Ben. He asked a friend, ”Are they
showing Gone With The Wind around
here? If so, I can go to see it and come
back and Dexter will still be playing
the same solo.”
9
Ett möte
med
Ben Webster
DESS-medlemmen Johan Etzler
skrev för några år sedan en liten be­
rättelse om ett möte med Ben Webster
som vi haft inlagd på vår hemsida.
Alla kanske inte erinrar sig den och
därför återger vi den här:
På 1960-talet råkade jag och Leppe
Sundevall en eftermiddag på Gyllene
Cirkeln bli presenterade för Ben Web­
ster av Arne Domnérus. Ett intryck
jag då fick av Ben var att ingen kunde
ha bredare axlar än den mannen.
Något år senare var jag på resa
med min lärare i det som kallades
”modern prose” på Stockholms uni­
versitet. Vi mellanlandade hos Leif
Anderson på Tessins Väg i Malmö.
Vi bjöds på middag och under mid­
dagens gång imponerades jag av
att Leif utan att ens behöva titta
sig bakåt kunde hitta Louis Jordans
”What’s the use of getting sober
when you gonna get drunk again”
i sin skivhylla.
Resan fortsatte till Köpenhamn
och vi hade fått tag på adressen till
Ben Websters hotell. Vid besök där
fann vi honom i sängen med hårnät
(!) om huvudet och TVn påslagen
men utan ljud och med sina egna
inspelningar klingande från en
bandspelare. Jag minns särskilt en
underbar version av beatleslåten
Yesterday med danska radions stor­
band. Undrar om den finns utgiven?
Då och då gick Ben upp från
sängen och pinkade i handfatet i
rummet. Vi pratade naturligtvis
mest om musik och Ellington. När
vi talade om Lawrence Brown
sa Ben; ”I called him Sweetie,
I named him!” Detta bara nämnt
som ett komplement till ”A Study
in Brown” (Bulletin 3/2009).
Kvällen tillbringade vi på Montmar­
tre och lyssnade på Ben Webster, bl a
med Rune Carlsson.
10
but I’ve never heard or read any other
mention of this. Certainly Webster never
had children or a ‘normal’ family life,
apart from that with the two older ladies.
It seems that Ben mostly needed women
to look after him, rather than provide a
romantic outlet. During his stay in Europe, this caregiving role was taken on in
Amsterdam by his landlady, a Mrs. Hartlooper, and later in Copenhagen by an
elderly nurse named Birgit Nordtorp.
My initial reaction to all this theorizing was one of shock and scepticism. Superficially, it seemed to fly in the face of
Webster’s image as a hard-living, brawling tough guy and I’m not overly fond of
posthumous psychoanalysis. However,
it’s possible that Ben was gay, it stands
to reason that there were many more gay
jazz musicians back then than we know
about. Lots of gay men have been married, and Ben’s ultra-macho persona
could have been a means of denial, overcompensation or even a cover to hide
something he felt would never be accepted in the hyper-masculine world of
jazz in those days. (Billy Strayhorn was
the only openly gay man in jazz at the
time, but he had the protection and sanctuary of being Ellington’s indispensable
right-hand man. Duke set Billy up with
everything he needed and the men in the
band loved Strayhorn like a brother.)
I have no idea if Ben was gay or not,
nor do I care. After all, he’s been dead for
over forty years and his sexual orientation was his business, not ours. But if he
was indeed gay, it might explain a lot of
the mysteries of his tempestuous personality. The frustration, angst and isolation
of being closeted all those years, coupled
with the racism he regularly met as a
black man in America, could well have
led to the sudden towering rages, the
loneliness and emotional extremes, the
quickness to find offence, the desire to
beat the shit out of somebody and make
them pay for all of this ugliness and pain.
Personally, I think Ben was disappointed
and angry at a world that was seldom as
pretty as the music he played or imagined. I don’t think we’ll ever know, but
for whatever reasons, Ben was a complicated and conflicted character. This
cost him dearly, but is also part of what
makes his music so compelling.
Ben Interlude #3
Between 1963 and ’64, Rob McConnell
lived in New York for a time, studying
arranging and playing valve trombone in
Maynard Ferguson’s band. One night he
found himself in a musician’s bar (probably Jim & Andy’s) quite late and Ben
Webster was there, out on a toot. Rob
had heard Ben in Toronto and loved his
playing, so he introduced himself and as
soon as Ben heard he was from Toronto,
he was all over Rob. “Toronto, you must
know my man Bob Price – wow, that
B.P. – what a motherfucker! Plays great
bass, tells good jokes and he knows how
to drink! Good dancer too!” (Apparently,
Ben and Bob danced a couple of fox-trots
together when in their cups at a party
one night in Toronto after a gig, and Ben
got a big kick out of it.) So Ben and Rob
did some more drinking and talking and
Ben became more and more nostalgic
about the good times he’d had with Bob
and decided he had to call him, right then
and there. Rob didn’t think this was such
a good idea and said as much; it was now
about three in the morning and Bob was
then living with his elderly, widowed
mother, who was a very nice, genteel lady
in somewhat frail health.
Ben was not to be denied however,
not in this state. “Don’t give me all that
bullshit about it being late, I got to talk
to my man B.P.!” Ben found Bob’s number in his book and bellowed over to the
bartender, “Give me five dollars’ worth
of quarters to make the goddamn payphone go!” He hauled his massive head
and shoulders into its narrow confines,
with his haunches and spindly legs
sticking out at a twenty-degree angle.
McConnell. Sorry about that, it wasn’t
my idea. I just met Ben and he got to
talking about you and Toronto and how
much he misses you and he just had to
call you and I couldn’t talk him out of
it. He’s fast asleep now, right out.” Bob
chuckled, “No problem, but be careful
when you wake him up. Maybe do a foxtrot with Ben and tell him it’s from me,
that’ll cheer him up.”
In Europe
He started bellowing out instructions
to the long distance operator and deposited some quarters into the phone, which
began ringing Bob’s number in Toronto.
This is what Rob heard from his end:
“Hello, s’that B.P.’s place? Whoozzat? His mutha? … Oh. I know itsh a
little late lady, shorry I woke ya up, but
thisisss important. I gotta talk to B.P.!
Never mind what time it ish, put B.P. on
– whaddya mean he’s shleeping – well,
wake him up, for Chrissakes! Tell him
ish Frog on the line from New York! He’ll
wonna talk t’ Frog!” As this was going
on, Ben was starting to yawn and get
sleepy, his tiny hat cocked back, shoulders leaning further and further in to
the booth, his legs now sticking out at
thirty-five-degree angle. He finally convinced Bob’s mother to go and wake Bob
up, the poor woman no doubt wondering
just who this shrieking Frog character
was and wishing her son had stuck to
accountancy and never became a musician. As she went off to do Ben’s bidding
against her better judgement, Ben started sagging and drooping into the booth,
his legs now on a full diagonal. By the
time Bob Price came on the line, Ben was
out cold, snoring like a bear, his face and
hat mashed up against the glass of the
booth. Rob went over behind Ben, and
heard Bob’s voice coming out of the receiver, “Hello. Hello Ben, are you there?
Hello?” Very, very carefully, Rob reached
around the sleeping giant and eased the
receiver from his hand. “Hi Bob, it’s Rob
Not long after Don Brown heard him at
The Town Tavern, Ben took himself off
to play a season at Ronnie Scott’s club in
London and stayed, eventually settling
in Amsterdam, then moving to Copenhagen in 1969. His days in Europe were
mixed. He enjoyed the more leisurely
pace of life there and the relative lack of
Jim Crow. And he worked quite steadily
and found a fresh and enthusiastic audience, Europeans loved his classic playing
and relished hearing him live for the first
time. But it was also lonely, he missed his
American musician friends and rejoiced
in periodic visits from people like Jimmy
Rowles and Phil Woods. He often found
European rhythm sections to be amateurish, lagging behind instead of pushing him as he liked. This was better in
Copenhagen though, as he found some
good rhythm men there – Kenny Drew,
N.H.Ö.P., Alex Riel and Tootie Heath.
He drank more and more and got bigger and bigger, resembling an inverted
pyramid moving about on spinet legs.
His health suffered and he needed a cane
to walk. His playing became slower and
slower and sometimes he was drunk to
the point where it unraveled. But mostly
his playing remained intact, the beautiful
sound, grace and his love of songs never
left him. He made some good records
in his last years, many of them on Black
Lion with the players mentioned above.
There’s a hilarious recording from this
period of Ben coaching the Danish Radio
Big Band at a rehearsal, teaching, willing
them to swing by all manner of profane,
obscene and vocal urgings. Hearing it is
the next best thing to having known him.
Ben died in Copenhagen on September
20, 1973, and is buried there. He decreed
on his deathbed that his saxophone Betsy
was not to be played after he died and it’s
now at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers. Ben was just 64, but in terms of mileage he lived many more years than that.
(DESS has got the kind permission of
the author to reprint this article which
was originally published on the author’s
blog site www.wallacebass.com. A bio of
Steve Wallace was presented in Bulletin
3/2014.
More about Ben Webster in our Bulletin:
A lengthy article by Stan Brager – The
Beauty in the Brute – can be found in
Bulletin 2/2012.)
11
It’s All True
Unfinished Orson Welles Film: Duke Ellington Hired To Write Music
By Fred Glueckstein
Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985)
was an American actor, director, writer, and producer who
worked in theatre, radio, and film. Welles is best remembered for
his innovative work in theatre, most notably Caesar (1937),
a Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar;
in radio, in the 1938 broadcast The War of the Worlds, one of the
most famous in the history of radio, and in film for Citizen Kane,
which is ranked as one of the all-time greatest films.
In 1941, Orson Welles conceived It’s All
True as an omnibus film that mixed documentary and docufiction. It was to have
been his third film for RKO, following Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent
Ambersons (1942). The original conception of It’s All True was to be in four parts:
The Story of Jazz, My Friend Bonito, The
Captain’s Chair, and Love Story.
That year, in Los Angeles, shortly after
the premiere of Citizen Kane, Welles sent
Duke Ellington a message backstage of
Jump for Joy. The message
asked Duke to meet Welles
at RKO the following morning at nine. Ellington was
on time. He later said “I never been anywhere else on
time in my life”. However,
Welles was an hour late.
Before Ellington could
get a word in, Welles jumped into his impressions
of Jump for Joy. “From the
first curtain to the last curtain. Blow by blow, every
number, every sketch, all of
it coming out of his mind
without notes - and he saw
it once! It was both a review
and a mass of suggestions,”
remembered Ellington. “It
was the most impressive
display of mental power
I’ve ever experience – just
pure genius.”
12
In fact, Welles was a tremendous Ellington admirer,who would see Jump for
Joy, Ellington’s full-length musical based
on themes of African-American identity
that debuted on July 10, 1941, on several
occasions.
Orson Welles, music written by Duke Ellington,” he said. “While you’re thinking
about this, you’re on salary at a thousand
dollars a week,” he told Ellington, “and
if you don’t take it, you’re a sucker!” “I
accept,” said Ellington.
During their first meeting, Welles asked
Ellington to do The Story of Jazz, which
was drawn from Louis Armstrong’s 1936
autobiography, Swing that Music. Armstrong was to star in the film. “I want
it to be written by Duke Ellington and
In Ellington’s autobiography, Music
is My Mistress, he wrote that the project
was going well. Duke had assistants, and
a lot of research was conducted. Then the
unexpected happened. Ellington explained that Welles had a big dispute with
Duke, Orson and Cab
RKO concerning another picture he was
doing in South America, and the company cancelled all of his projects, including
It’s All True. Ellington wrote: “He [Welles] left them
with a lot of film on their hands, which
I understand they couldn’t put together
without him. That was the end of It’s
All True. No filming was done - just a
lot of research. I collected up to $12,500,
for which I wrote a total of twenty-eight
bars, and it was supposed to represent
Buddy Bolden,” wrote Ellington. “I tried
to recapture some of it in A Drum Is a
Woman (1957), but I am not sure of the
relationship between them, because a lot
of time elapsed between Jump for Joy
and A Drum Is a Woman.”
In 1945, long after RKO terminated It’s
All True, Welles again tried to make the
jazz history film without success. He
spoke about it with Armstrong, who responded with a six-page autobiographical sketch.
John Edward Hasse in Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington wrote of It’s All True: “As Hollywood
had yet to portray jazz authentically in a
feature film, Welles’s original idea had
created high expectations: the disappointment in the jazz community was
widespread.”
Ellington later wrote that he unexpectedly met Welles on a train to Chicago in
1956. It was just after A Drum Is a Woman was released. “I told him about it,
and said he should see it. “Then he told
me about his play” wrote Ellington”. The
play was titled Le Temps Court, a reworking of Faust in a program under the title
The Blessed and the Damned, and was
scheduled to premiere in Paris.
When Ellington gracefully declined
taking on the task to write the score, he
suggested Billy Strayhorn. This was acceptable to Welles, who first met Strayhorn on the West Coast in the 1940s. At
the time, there was speculation of an Ellington-Strayhorn-Welles collaboration,
which did not occur. With Strayhorn now
to write the score for Le Temps Court, he
travelled to Paris to do the score on-site.
One of the pieces was devoted to the
play’s female protagonist Helen of Troy.
It was titled “Helen’s Theme”. After the
production of Le Temps Court was cancelled before the premiere, Strayhorn later adapted “Helen’s Theme” for his band
and renamed it Orson, a work that is too
little known.
Although Orson, is credited to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, Walter van
de Leur, who has made very extensive
studies about Strayhorn and published
a book of his finding, Something to Live
For-The Music of Billy Strayhorn published by Oxford University Press (2002),
established that Strayhorn wrote Orson.
Ellingtonia: The Recorded Music of Duke
Ellington and His Sideman. Compiled
by W. E. Timner, Fourth Edition shows
Orson was recorded by Duke Ellington
& His Famous Orchestra on April 7, 1953
in Los Angeles at Capitol Studios. It was
first issued on Capitol T-637 “Dance To
the Duke”. Ellington Orchestra’s Orson
was a strangely abridged version, and it
didn’t do justice to Strayhorn’s intentions,
which he crafted as ‘an intricate orchestral
setting around one of his most inspired
and emotionally charged themes’.
Also recorded with Orson was My
Old Flame; I Can’t Give You Anything But
Love; Ain’t Nothin’ Nothin’, Baby, Without
You; Stormy Weather; Star Dust, and Three
Little Words. These numbers appeared on
Capitol H-440 “Premiered by Ellington”.
On December 3, 1955, Orson was again
recorded live by the Ellington Orchestra
from a NBC broadcast from Zardi’s, but
it has never been released. Finally, Orson,
in its original full length version, was
recorded in the late 1990s by the Dutch
Jazz Orchestra under the direction of Jerry van Rooijen. It was released on Challenge Records CHR 70091.
John Edward Hasse in Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington wrote: “Incidentally, Welles reportedly said that, other than himself,
Ellington was the only genius he had
ever known.” Duke Ellington and Orson
Welles were brilliant in their respective
fields, and both men left their personal
imprint on the twentieth century. Each
will be remembered for their individual
contributions in jazz and cinema.
The 24th International
Duke Ellington Study
Group Conference
Organisatörerna Michael Dinwiddie
och Mercedes Ellington.
Kompletterande information om konferensen sipprar så sakteliga in från
arrangören Duke Ellington Center For
The Arts (DECFA). Ursprungligen annonserades konferensen att äga rum 1923 maj. Nu har man koncentrerat den till
19-22 maj. Innehållsmässigt tycks detta
inte innebära några förändringar men
många delegater har säkert bokat sina
resor och hotell baserat på den första informationen.
DECFA har skickat ut en ”Tentative
Conference Schedule” varur vi kan
notera följande: Under de fyra dagarna kommer presentationer i olika ämnen att framföras av Philippe Baudoin,
Matthias Heyman, David Hajdu, Krin
Grabbard, Daryl Waters, Steven Lasker, Bill Saxonis, Phil Schaap, Mick Carlon, Ken Steiner, Olle Edström, Gregory Marion, David Palmquist, Marcello
Piras, Will Friedwald, Frits Schjött och
Carl Woideck.
S.k. ”paneler” kommer att behandla
olika Ellingtonämnen och i dessa kommer namn som Rebecca Fulop, Carmen de Lavallade, Julie Malnig, John
Wriggle, Michele Corcella, Nate Sloan,
Herb Boyd, Mercedes Ellington, Eli
Yamin att ingå. Man annonserar dessutom ”Surprise Guest Performers”.
Delegaterna kommer även att bjudas på musikalisk underhållning
bestående av The Duke Ellington Center Big Band, Bobby Sababria’s Multiverse Big Band och en trio under ledning av Antoinette Montague.
Värt att notera är att man kommer
att visa filmversionen av ”A Drum Is A
Woman”.
Mera detaljerad information om konferensen kan inhämtas på http://decfa.org
Vi har all anledning att tro att konferensen kommer att bli lyckad.
DESS
13
Satin Doll
One of Duke Ellington’s most frequently played numbers
Bill Kirchner is a composer-arranger,
saxophonist, bandleader, educator, record
and radio producer and jazz historian.
In an interview by Ethan Iverson he has
the following to say about Satin Doll:
BK: On the Ed Sullivan Show I heard the
Ellington band playing Satin Doll. What
anybody think of the tune Satin Doll it’s
been mauled by bad lub date or lounge
bands. To hear that tune played by the
Ellington band with that saxophone section and those voicings is an unforgettable experience.
EI: The original Capitol recording of
Satin Doll is unbelievable. Currently in
our repertoire it has become this bland
AABA thing that just cycles forever. But
when you listen to the first recording,
that’s not what it is. It’s got moving parts
and it’s very specific. The counterpoint
in the orchestra is complicated, and also
in some kind of way a bass feature.
BK: They eventually had a bass solo as
well. On the At the Bal Masque version
a few years later with Jimmy Woode, it
became like a bass feature. That was an
Ellington and Strayhorn tune, apparently as we now know, Duke wrote the
melody and Billy Strayhorn wrote the
harmonies, which are very II/V-ish in a
way that Duke’s wasn’t. Anything in Ellington’s music that smells of II/V-ism,
you can be pretty sure is Strayhorn.
EI: Ah, I see
BK: The estates have been arguing ever
since. As with many of Ellington’s tunes,
it was composed as an instrumental and
later on lyrics were added. In this case
maybe the worst lyrics that Johnny Mercer ever wrote.
EI: They’re not particularly good, are they?
BK: They’re terrible! And especially for
Johnny Mercer, by his standards. They’re
Johnny Mercer on a very bad day. But we
are stuck with them.
EI: Tell me about seeing the Ellington
band at 12 years of age.
KB: It was at the Pittsburgh Jazz Festival. Several bands played. And Duke’s
band played Satin Doll, and Billy Strayhorn was introduced by Duke. From that
night on, my fate was sealed.
14
Satin Doll on Capitol
After Duke Ellington had left Columbia
and signed up with Capitol Records his
first recording date for the new company
was on April 6, 1953, and the very first
composition recorded was Satin Doll.
Back in 1995 Mosaic Records issued a
CD-box entitled The Complete Capitol
Recordings of Duke Ellington. The very
informative inlet was written by Stanley
Dance and here we quote what he has to
say about Satin Doll:
”Satin Doll was recorded first – and for
the first time – at this first session for Capitol. It was far from an instant hit, yet
Ellington had much faith in the number
and worked hard in later years to secure
its mass acceptance. Not only did his
band play it every night, but eventually
he would play it as a piano solo whenever he was interviewed on radio or television. The orchestral treatment varied subsequently (Ray Nance’s eight bars, as here,
were long an integral part) until it became
more of a bass feature. The somewhat unusual coloration of the reed section derived
from the fact that it was led by Paul Gonsalves. The tempo here is noticeably slower
than that favored later.”
When studying New DESOR one finds
that Satin Doll is listed no more than 536
times. Ellington kept the number on his
repertoir for the rest of his career. These
536 occassions are mostly live recordings
which have been saved but far from all of
them have been released. Needless to say
Satin Doll was performed on numerous
other occassions which have not been saved on tape.
Who was
the ”Satin Doll”?
The musicologist Walter van de Leur
has made a thorough research on the life
and works of Billy Strayhorn in his book
Something to Live For – The Music of Billy
Strayhorn (Oxford University Press 2002)
but funny enough he has nothing to say
about Satin Doll in this otherwise very informative book. However, in the recently
published Strayhorn – An Illustrated Life
edited by Alyce Claerbaut and David
Schlesinger (Agate Publishing 2015) van
de Leur has the following to say:
”It is strange how some of a composer’s
most famous pieces can be anomalies in
his or her oeuvre. Neither Ellington nor
Strayhorn hardly ever wrote straightforward Tin Pan Alley-type tunes, such
as Satin Doll. In fact, they hardly ever
cowrote single works to begin with. In
the case of Satin Doll, however, Strayhorn reportedly fleshed out a Ellington
riff, added chords and lyrics, and dedicated the piece to his mother, whom he lovingly called satin doll. Ellington maintained that it was his father’s nickname
for Evie Ellis, the unofficial Mrs. Ellington. Other women since have claimed
that Duke told them that they were the
song’s secret dedicatee.
The tune became a modest hit in 1953
as an instrumental piece, but its success
grew after Johnny Mercer added the hip
lyrics. Strayhorn’s original lyrics are lost
but Mercer’s version may partly retain
them. The Ellington sketch and the original Strayhorn reworking haven’t surfaced either. There is, however, a little allusion to Satin Doll in Strayhorn’s Kissing
Bug, composed roughly ten years earlier.
The true extent of all these various contributions remains clouded, enough so
that some parties took the case to court,
where a judge ruled that the credits
should remain as they were.”
In David Hajdu’s biography of Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life (Farrar Straus Giroux
1996) one can read the following:
”Most constructively, Strayhorn fleshed
out an Ellington riff sketch with harmony
and lyrics – an ode to Strayhorn’s mother, spun around Strayhorn’s pet name
for her – and ended up with Satin Doll.
Though Johnny Mercer was brought in
to replace Strayhorn’s oedipal lyrics with
ones evoking more commerical malefemale love, Satin Doll was recorded as
an instrumental and became a modest
hit (and the last single-record success of
Ellington’s career), peaking at number
27 in three weeks on the Billboard chart.
(Strayhorn’s original lyrics to Satin Doll
are not known to have survived.)
Vi kvinnor
av Kid
Den följande artikeln var införd i Aftonbladet den 21 oktober 1933.
Författaren bakom signaturen är Kid Severin, legendarisk kåsör i
framför allt Expressen. Men hon började sin karriär på Aftonbladet,
som gett oss tillstånd att återge hennes artikel. Efter Duke Ellingtons
besök i Europa 1933 blev han synnerligen uppmärksammad på denna
sida av Atlanten vilket troligen föranledde dessa, på den tiden kanske
relativt vanliga synpunkter på en musikform som började göra sig allt
mer gällande. Den som gjorde oss uppmärksam på artikeln var DESSmedlemmen Alf Arvidsson, etnolog och musikforskare vid Umeå uni­
versitet, som bl a gett ut boken ”Jazzens väg i svenskt musikliv”.
Mitt på dagen promenerade jag på Birger
Jarlsgatan och tänkte på livet, döden och
ett rött sidenband på min nya laméklänning. Då fick jag se en skylt där det stod
Harmoni. Just vad en stackars höstdeprimerad människa kan behöva, sade jag
till mig själv och gick in i affären bakom
skylten. Men där fanns endast disharmonier, ty affären är en grammofonaffär och
luften darrade av hot-musikens nervösa,
sönderslitna rytm.
Svart jazzkung
Eftersom den lilla affären bl a är specialiserad på exklusiv och hypermodern
dansmusik och älskad av staden jazzungdom och jazzmusikanter bad jag att
få höra på det allra senaste.
Naturligtvis var det Duke Ellington.
Denna kolsvarta herre, som
plötsligt erövrat världen
med sin hot music med sitt
iskallt medvetna, koketta
och djävulska utnyttjande
av oljud. Hans negerorkester
har en rytm och en barnslig
glädje att föra oväsen som
kommer det att rycka i de
mest förstockade knäveck.
När Duke Ellington var i
London togs han emot med
ovationer som en Garbo och
en musikkritiker skrev om
honom: ”Hans musik är inte
en orgie, det är ett vetenskapligt applicerande av en noga
utmätt och farlig stimulans.”
Blues och jazzläppar
De nya plattor mänskligheten har fått att
stimulera sig med är ganska många. Duke
tycks vara lika produktiv som han är svart.
Jazzlips heter en snabb foxtrot. Här ligger man särskilt märke till orkesterns
berömda klarinett, eller den här gången
rättare sagt två klarinetter. De visslar
fräckt som gatpojkar. När trumpeten
skäller som bäst kommer plötsligt ett
mjukt pianosolo.
På baksidan är Harlemania, också en
snabb foxtrot. Den har en snabb, lättflytande, elektrisk rytm. Ibland stannar tonen, utdragen som ett tuggummi.
Sloppy Joe är bluesbetonad. En trött
herre stönar långt och rytmiskt. Klarinetten drillar ovanligt gällt och fräckt mot
en mörk bakgrund av dovt dunkande.
I Rocky Mountain Blues har man lämnat de fräcka effekterna. Den är lugn och
klar som luften över bergen. En svag, ljus
trumpet, ett lätt pianissimo.
En annan bra blues är Bundle of Blues. En
foxtrot med en lätt, flytande rytm är Hyde
Park. Den har något av
den vårdade galoppen
hos fina hästar på promenadritt.
Ellingtonbandet
anländer till
Waterloo Station,
London, 1933
15
Nya CD-skivor
Glädjande nog har vi i flera av de senaste
Bulletinerna kunnat anmäla nyutgivna
skivor med Duke Ellington, och denna gång
kan vi presentera ytterligare två nyheter
för våra läsare. Den första har getts ut av
Storyville och är betitlad
Thing-Be Cool And Groovy For Me)/Satin
Doll/R.T.M./In Triplicate into Satin Doll
DUKE ELLINGTON
& His Orchestra – Rotterdam 1969
Elvin chez Duke European Tour – January 1966
Under Europaturnén 1969 uppträdde orkestern i en mångfald länder i Europa,
bl. a. i Sverige och som i detta fall De
Doelen, Rotterdam, där två konserter
genomfördes den 7:e november. Här rör
det sig om den sena konserten, som är
nästan fullständig. Repertoaren är den
för turnén gängse, och innehåller inga
speciella överraskningar, men det skall
sägas att ljudkvalitén är ypperlig och
att medföljande skivfolder är intressant
och välskriven och författad av vår danske DESS-medlem Bjarne Busk. Ett nummer som bör nämnas är ”Black Butterfly”
som tagits till heder igen efter många års
frånvaro och framförs på ett förtjänstfullt
sätt. Skivan finns nu ute i näthandeln och
bör inte vara svår att få tag på.
Låtlistan är som följer:
Take The A Train (theme)& C Jam Blues/Kin­
da Dukish & Rockin’ In Rhythm/Take The
A Train/Up Jump/La Plus Belle Africaine/
Come Off The Veldt/El Gato/Black Butterfly/
Things Ain’t What They Used To Be/Don’t
Get Around Much Anymore/Medley#1
(Mood Indigo-Sophisticated Lady)/Medley
#2 (Making That Scene-It Don’t Mean A
16
Maison du Duke MDD-007
är titeln på en ny CD som givits ut av vår
franska systerförening och endast kaninhandlas av föreningens medlemmar. Det
som är unikt med denna skiva är att Elvin Jones spelar med i stället för Louie
Bellson som inte följde med på turnén.
Dessutom finns ytterligare en trumslagare med, Skeets Marsh. De två spelar
att döma av den fina ljudupptagningen
samtidigt, men en del överraskande
markeringar och effekter, liksom extra
tyngd och drive torde kunna tillskrivas
Jones. Inspelningen är gjord vid en konsert i Salle Pleyel i Paris den 29 januari
1966, och innehåller musik från både den
första och andra konserten denna afton,
samt en inspelning av Ad Lib On Nippon
gjord kvällen innan i Frankfurt.
Skivan har följande innehåll:
Take The A Train/Medley (Black & Tan Fan­
tasy-Creole Love Call-The Mooche)/Chelsea
Bridge/El Viti/La Plus Belle Africaine/Trom­
bonio-Bustoso-Issimo(Trombone
Buster)/
Passion Flower/Things Ain’t What They
Used To Be/Wings And Things/Take The A
Train/Ad Lib On Nippon
Anders Asplund
Duke
Ellington’s
European
tour 1948
In the Bulletin 4/2015 on page 13 was
an article about recordings made by the
Ellington group during the tour. It was
said that the conference CD issued 1997
contained a recording of Take The ”A”
Train made in July 1948. However, Roger
Boyes has made us aware of the fact that
research has proved that the recording
actually emanates from a telecast from
Liverpool on October 17, 1958. Duke is
joined by Malcolm Mitchell g., and Russ
Stableford b. We stand corrected.
Jazz
Humour
Dad:
Your mother says she’ll leave
me if I don’t quit buying
Duke Ellington records.
Son:
That’s tough, dad.
Dad:
Yes, we shall miss her.
Nya
medlemmar
DESS hälsar följande
nya medlemmar välkomna i vår
illustra förening
Jan Leonard, Djursholm
Torgil Rosenberg, Täby
DESS behöver fler medlemmar.
Inspirera Dina vänner och bekanta
att också vara med!
Elvin chez Duke
Albumtexten till CDn Elvin chez Duke ger utförligare och
närmare uppgifter om omständigheterna kring Elvin Jones korta
gästspel hos Duke Ellington. Claude Carrière har skrivit texten
som här återges i förkortad översättning från franska.
I november 1965 bestämde sig John
Coltrane för att börja spela med dubbla
trumslagare. Rashied Ali engagerades
för att komplettera Elvin Jones. De problem som uppstod ledde snabbt till slutet för Coltranes historiska kvartett. Ali
och Jones fungerade dåligt tillsammans,
både personligen och musikaliskt. Dessutom var Jones och pianisten McCoy
Tyner båda emot att avlägsna sig från
den regelbundna rytm som båda kände
för. De var (som bl a Coltrane-biografen
Lewis Porter riktigt påpekat) inga free
form-musiker. Tyner slutade först, i november -65. Ali ersattes av Frank Butler,
men för Jones kvarstod problemen; i januari -66 accepterade han ett erbjudande
från Ellington. Efter ett framträdande i
San Francisco tog han planet till Frankfurt för att ansluta till DE som turnerade
i Europa sedan tre dagar.
Louie Bellson hade varit Dukes trummis från slutet av juli -65 som ersättare
för en utarbetad Woodyard. Inför Europaturnén lämnade han bandet för att spela med hustrun, sångerskan Pearl Bailey
och ersattes av ”den värderade trumslagaren” Skeets Marsh från Philadelphia.
(1974 åter i Europa med Count Basies
orkester). Efter konserterna i Lissabon
och Barcelona 24-25/1 var Ellington föga
tillfreds med Marshs spel och tillkallade
Elvin Jones; inte för att ersätta Marsh
utan för att assistera! Samt, utan tvivel,
och i hemlighet, för att roa sig med att
ruska om ”gamlingarna” i orkestern (och
det är sant, det finns vittnesmål om hur
Duke, Gonsalves och ytterligare några få
gladdes medan vissa andra inte var så
roade). Problemet för Jones var emellertid att han åter befann sig som hos Coltrane, som en av två trumslagare.
Elvin anslöt till orkestern i Frankfurt
28/1. Efter konserten där framträdde de
i Paris 29/1 (två konserter i Salle Pleyel),
dagen därpå i Milano (dessa tre dagar
svarade Ella Fitzgerald med trio och
blåsarna i Dukes orkester för konsertens
andra del). Situationen löstes upp 31/1.
Efter nästa konsert i Geneve återvände
Jones till New York, medan Duke kallade in Sam Woodyard som vilade ut
hos familjen i Boston och nu anslöt sig
till truppen i Basel 2/2.* Hela sällskapet
återkom till Salle Pleyel den 11/2 mycket
nöjda med att alla störningar under denna episod nu hade lett till ordning igen
med den oersättlige Sam Woodyard på
plats med sina magiska trumstockar!
(Almbumtexten berättar därefter lite om
de olika numren på skivan, vilket inte refereras här.)
*Anm: Tveksam uppgift, troligen Zurich, där
man spelade 2/2, i Basel dagen därpå. Däref­
ter gick turnén vidare bl a till Sverige.
Intressant att notera i detta sammanhang:
Ellington torde ha haft aktuell information om Elvin Jones och hans kapacitet;
Jones medverkade nämligen en kort tid
före de fyra dagarna i Europa hos Duke,
10-11/1 på inspelningen av Earl Hines
förnämliga album Once Upon a Time
(prod Bob Thiele, Impulse A-9108) där
också flera av Dukes dåvarande musiker
utgjorde stommen i bandet: Johnny Hodges, Lawrence Brown, Russell Procope,
Jimmy Hamilton, Paul Gonsalves, Buster Cooper, Cat Anderson; dessutom tidigare och senare bandmedlemmar: Ray
Nance, Clark Terry, Harold Ashby, Bill
Berry, Aaron Bell och Sonny Greer – som
alternerade med Elvin). Elvin karakteriserades vid tillfället som ”a hell off a
drummer” av Procope, även om han lite
senare rimligen hörde till de äldre som
vädrade visst missnöje enligt Carrières
albumtext. Hines-skivan är en höjdare,
som när den kom lite sensationellt visade hur förnämligt Elvin kunde spela mer
traditionellt svängigt, tungt och drivande än man visste. Han skulle passa hos
Duke!, minns jag att jag tänkte då, och
tycker fortfarande även om Woodyards
tyvärr korta och upphackade återkomst
fram till -68 naturligtvis var det allra
bästa. Redan tidigare hade Duke faktiskt
också spelat med Elvin Jones, i slutet av
1962 på den skiva Duke och Coltrane
gjorde tillsammans och där Jones alternerade med Woodyard.
Claes Englund
17
Azalea
Azalea är en krukväxt som i Sverige är oftast
förekommande på fönsterbräden. Den förekommer dock också i
buskform i trädgårdar och i varmare klimat växer den vilt.
Den är släkt med Rhododendron och är synnerligen giftig. I äldre
kinesisk poesi kallas den för ”Thinking of home bush”.
Staden Sao Paulo i Brasilien har den som sin stadssymbol.
I flera amerikanska sydstater har man årliga azalea-festivaler.
Men vad har detta med Duke Ellington att göra?
Förbindelsen med Duke Ellington är det
faktum att han 1946 eller 1947 komponerade en melodi som han gav namnet
Azalea. Den spelades inte ofta och i New
DESOR finns den endast registrerad vid
tre tillfällen. Det första är från den 10 juni
1947 då Duke Ellington gjorde en serie
inspelningar för Capitol Radio
Transcriptions. Vid tillfället ersattes Ellington av Billy Strayhorn
vid pianot. Numret är en feature
för barytonsångaren Chester
Crumpler som framför Ellingtons
egen text med ett kortare avbrott
för ett trumpetsolo troligen av Harold Baker. Skivproducenten Wally Heider köpte rättigheten att ge
ut dessa Capitolinspelningar på
sitt LP-märke Hindsight men han
valde att välja bort Azalea. Hans
förklaring var att han inte uppskattade Crumplers sätt att framföra numret och han ansåg dessutom att
melodin var en undermålig komposition
av Ellington och inte värd att ingå i samlingen. Det är självklart Heiders högst
personlig uppfattning men en samlare
tycker naturligtvis att i en samlingsutgåva bör allt material ingå. Smak är något
som bör överlåtas på lyssnaren.
Bland samlare cirkulerar en inspelning
som inte är registrerad i New DESOR.
Det är en liveinspelning från Ciro’s i Los
Angeles den 7 augusti 1947. Den skiljer
sig inte mycket från den föregående inspelningen.
Azalea är mycket vacker som melodi
betraktat men många har uttryckt sitt
missnöje över texten. Ellington var en
avsevärt bättre kompositör än textförfattare. Han hade säkert väntat sig något
bättre av kompositionen men i brist på
uppskattning tycks den ha tagits ur repertoaren. Men den 11 december 1951
tas melodin till nåder igen vid en gram-
18
mofoninspelning för Columbia. Arrangemanget är till vissa delar nytt och
man kan höra kortare inpass av Jimmy
Hamilton. Sångare är nu Lloyd Oldham,
som endast medverkade i bandet en
kort tid. När man hör hans insats kan
man lätt förstå varför han inte fick fort-
satt engagemang. CBS gav naturligtvis
inte ut denna inspelning men franska
CBS hade fått en kopia och gav 1983 ut
inspelningen i sin serie ”The Complete
Duke Ellington 1947-1952” (CBS 66607).
Dessförinnan hade den även getts ut på
Up-To-Date 2004.
Denna misslyckade inspelning torde
ha lett till att Ellington nu definitivt tog
bort numret ur sin repertoar och kanske
föll det i glömska. Men 1961 händer något som gör att kompositionen Azalea
är värd att uppmärksamma. Då gjorde
skivbolaget Roulette en inspelning med
Louis Armstrong och Duke Ellington
tillsammans. Det var Armstrongs orkester plus Ellington som genomgående
spelade in Ellingtonkompositioner. Den
första LPn med titeln “L. Armstrong and
D. Ellington together for the first time”
(R-52074) innehöll inte Azalea. Det var
först 1964 när man gav ut “The Great Reunion” (R-52103) som man fick möjlighet
att höra Armstrong framföra Azalea. 1990
kom Roulette ut med CD-boxen ”The
Complete Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington Sessions” (CDP-7938442) med
alla nummer plus andratagningar.
Vid Ellingtonkonferensen i Stockholm
2004 var George Avakian inbjuden som
föredragshållaren och han hade som
ämne valt ”Louis Armstrong, Guest Artist with the Duke Ellington Orchestra”
med underrubriken ”The recording that
never came about”. När Avakian var
inspelningschef på Columbia hade han
som ambition att få till stånd en inspelning med Armstrong och Ellington tillsammans. Av olika anledningar kunde
detta inte genomföras.
Senare i sin karriär fick Avakian i uppdrag att sätta samman en 3-CD-box med
olika Armstronginspelningar i kronologisk ordning. En medarbetare föreslog
då Azalea men Avakians kommentar
var ”Oh, nobody ever heard of
it before, and the melody is hard
to follow and Duke’s lyrics are
not exactly professional”. Men
efter ingående diskussioner och
studium visade det sig att med
stor sannolikhet hade Ellington
komponerat melodin 1946 med
Louis Armstrong i tankarna. I
Armstrongs biografi ”Swing
That Music” (sid. 19-22) beskriver Louis hur han i unga år
råkar somna in bland azaleor.
Avakian beskriver det ”Duke’s
lyrics parallel a very poetic description by Louis about falling asleep
in an azalea swamp during a Boys
Home picnic.”
Avakian berättar vidare; “Azalea is a
very difficult song. Dan Morgenstern,
who was at the session, told me how
Louis did it in two takes. The first take
was pretty good, and you can hear it because it was finally released. On the second take Pops nailed it!”
Eddie Lambert har följande att säga om
Rouletteinspelningarna i sin “Listener’s
Guide”: “The repertoire is mainly taken
from Ellington’s output as a songwriter,
with C Jam Blues masquerading as Duke’s
Place and Azalea, a little known ballad
from the forties, the only surprise. This
last item has just about the poorest lyrics – written by Ellington himself – of
any Ducal song. They are the epitome
of that overblown, overcolored manner
which characterized Ellington’s verbal
expression at its worst. Fortunately they
are quite overshadowed by Armstrong’s
majestic statement of the theme.”
I inlägget i Roulettes CD-box skriver
Dan Morgenstern: “Duke mustered up
the courage to pull out a lead sheet for
Azalea. He pulled up a chair, sat down
facing Louis, and held up the words and
music. Louis donned his horn-rimmed
glasses, smiled that matchless smile, and
began to hum and sing. An expert sightreader, he soon had the melody down.
The lyric, even with Duke having moved
to the piano, was a bit challenging, but
it, too, fell into place. As all this was taking shape, Ellington was positively beaming, and when a take had been made,
he was ecstatic. If indeed he’d had Louis
in mind when he created this hothouse
conceit, he had chosen properly, for no
one else could have made it credible but
the incredible Mr. Strong.”
Efter alla synpunkter på sångtexten till
Azalea torde det vara lämpligast att här
återge den:
It was such a fine spring day
down Louisiana way
With fragrance, divine
and such magnificent regalia,
Azalea
Oh what a lovely sight
in red and pink and white
Can’t help, but believe
that nothin’ evil can assail ya
So naive, Azalea
You were at ease, on the knees
of the moss covered trees
whose tops meant to make
a high ceiling
in the church-like clump
of a cypress swamp
I’ve yet to get that same
strange feeling
I’ve got to go back there
and find that blossom fair
I always dream of
Because with you
who could be a failure
My first love, Azalea
Det är inte många andra artister som
spelat in Azalea. I diskografierna hittat
man ungefär ett dussin, bl.a. med Sonny
Rollins, Butch Miles och Randy Sandke.
George Avakians kåseri kan läsas i dess
helhet i Bulletin 3 och 4/2008.
Bo Haufman
Recension av
Dess CD 3
Hösten 2015 gav DESS ut sin
tredje CD till medlemmarna.
Den innehöll Duke Ellingtons
första konsert i Stockholms
Konserthus den 6 februari 1963.
Ett exemplar av skivan skickades
till den amerikanska föreningen
The International Association of
Jazz Record Collectors (IAJRC).
Föreningen publicerar kvartalsvis
en mycket läsvärd tidning, The
IAJRC Journal, och i december­
numret 2015 kunde man läsa en
recension av vår CD författad av
Bob Reny. Valda delar återges här:
The Duke Ellington Society of Sweden
released another winner – this time
live recordings of the orchestra from
1963 when Duke was visiting Sweden.
I find the CD fascinating because it
captures a complete concert – just as
presented – with Duke introducing
the titles and making witty comments
about each soloist. There were two
concerts in the Concert Hall on that
date and this recording captures the
first one in its entirety.
A quick check with Tom Lord’s Jazz
Discography shows no new material,
most of it was recorded at one time or
another, but these versions have the
added zip of a live performance and
little nuances that make them a little
different from the studio takes.
Just poking around, you’ve got Jimmy Hamilton playing Silk Lace against
a very busy background, Cat Anderson’s pyrothechnics on Eighth Veil,
Lawrence Brown and Harry Carney
working Pyramid with Latin undertones and Carney blowing the cobwebs away.
Duke and his men play the Asphalt
Jungle Theme in a shuffle cadence (he
wrote the music for the TV show in
1961) but the outcome pales compared
to the other cuts. Ray Nance on violin
turns in a superlative performance
on Guitar Amour, with a cha cha cha,
from the soundtrack of Paris Blues.
On Cop Out & Cop Out Extension, everyone in the band, except the rhythm
section, steps back and lets Paul Gonsalves just play and play – joy oh joy.
Up tempo Jam With Sam has Carney
back to lead the group, but he’s soon
joined by Buster Cooper, Procope and
trumpeters Burrowes and Anderson,
with Anderson schrieking at the end.
Stompy Jones is smooth and relaxed
and the two Cootie numbers just ooze
his muted horn, one over a measured
tempo and one over a shuffle. The
lushness of Johnny Hodges fills Star
Crossed Lovers and Dancers In Love is
all Ellington, an encore, that is delightfully light and frothy. There are two
very familiar chestnuts – Things Ain’t
… and Do Nothing …, the last the only
vocal in the concert and sung by Milt
Grayson, a baritone with a Eckstine
kind of voice.
This is the second DESS disc we’ve
reviewed and, like the first, it’s only
distributed to members of the Duke
Ellington Society of Sweden. But you
can join the Society and then receive
this CD and all that follow. The Society also issues an impressive quarterly
glossy magazine on Ellington that has
enough articles in English to make it
worth your membership fee, the last
issues featured articles on Clark Terry and Freddy Jenkins. If interested,
please contact Bo Haufman, e-mail:
[email protected] for details on
how to join. If you love Ellington, talk
to Bo.
Vi, och inte minst vice ordföranden, känner oss hedrade av de uppskattande orden. DESS har nu en ny
CD planerad för distribution i höst och
vi är övertygade om att även den kommer att bli en ”winner”.
DESS
19
Posttidning B
Duke Ellington Society of Sweden
c/o Leif Jönsson, Anbudsvägen 15
187 50 TÄBY
KALLELSE!
Duke Ellington Society of Sweden
hälsar sina medlemmar välkomna till årets andra
medlemsmöte den 9 maj.
Bosse Tigrén
Duke
Ellington
Society
of Sweden,
DESS
ISSN 1400-8831
DESS
PLATS:
Franska Skolans Aula,
Döbelnsgatan 3, Stockholm.
Portkod för kvällen: 0905
Entrén öppen fr. kl. 17.00.
Entréavgift: 100:- i kontanter
Närmaste T-banestation: Hötorget
Glöm ej portkoden som
endast gäller för denna kväll.
Kommer Du inte in så ring:
070-622 88 16, 070-540 70 09.
PROGRAM:
17.30 - 18.30
Thomas Erikson – DESS-medlem
med ett gediget kunnande om
Duke Ellington och hans musik
kåserar på temat Joe ”Tricky Sam”
Nanton.
18.30 – 19.00
Paus med möjlighet till mingel
och inköp av öl/vin och wraps,
30:-/st.
Obs! Endast kontanter gäller.
19.00 – 20.15
För kvällens musikaliska inslag
svara en trio under ledning av Bosse Tigrén på klarinett assisterad av
Joel Svensson gitarr och Eirik Lund
bas. Repertoaren kommer att bestå
av mainstream jazz och självklart
med inslag av Duke Ellington.
Tidsangivelserna är ungefärliga.
20
Du har väl inte
glömt att betala
Din medlemsavgift.
Den är viktig för
vår verksamhet.
Vänligen sätt in
250:- på DESS
bankgiro: 211-3207.
Vi tackar!
Har Du inte betalat
är detta den sista
Bulletin Du får och
det vore väl synd
att gå miste om intressanta framtida
nummer och nästa
CD-utgåva!!
c/o Leif Jönsson
Anbudsvägen 15, 187 50 TÄBY
08 - 51 05 03 14, 0706 22 88 16
[email protected]
Redaktionsgrupp:
Bo Haufman,
Claes Englund, Claes Brodda,
Thomas Harne,
Ulf Callius (layout)
Bankgiro:
211-3207
Hemsida:
www.ellington.se
PayPal account:
[email protected]
DESS medlemsavgift
är per kalenderår:
Inom Norden 250 kr
Membership outside Scandinavia
annual fee USD 40
Vid köp hos DESS, använd vårt
bankgiro: 211-3207